Poor Rupert

Remember when we were working together back in the 1980's? We were the renegades. We were the anti-establishment motherfckers with no fear, no favor, and no conscience. We'd take the polite world of American journalism and we'd dump scorpion fish into the punchbowl. And now this?

Don't they get it? James was supposed to be the fall guy, the half-bright spalpeen who took the bullet for the doddering, lovable old paterfamilias. Nobody was supposed to notice that you clung to your power and to your control like the old digger you were. Nobody was supposed to know that the despicable phone-hacking was a feature, not a bug, of the culture of journalism in which you took such pride. The worst thing that ever happened was that journalism turned into a gentleman's game. The recently concluded White House Correspondents Dinner is proof enough of that, and so is almost every television network between the hours of 10 a.m. and noon every Sunday. Honesty was sold for prestige, and integrity for access. We traded Deadline USA for The West Wing and the business was not the better for the swap.

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And that was where you came in with the big con, boss. You convinced people that they were the last outpost of real reporting. You convinced them of that even when you were underpaying them — once, back when you were trying anything to build up the Fox Network and you hadn't yet discovered The Simpsons, I covered an NBA playoff game wearing a button that read, "Joan Rivers Got My Raise" — and you sold them the same line of phony proletarian bushwah that the Reagan people were selling the rubes in the 1980's: that they were the salt of the earth, the real Americans, while, meanwhile, the plutocrats like yourselves were getting rich and laughing all the way to your future trophy wives.

Within the company, though, just as it did in the savings-and-loan industry, that fake buccaneer spirit curdled into lawlessness and fundamental indecency. Hacking the cellphone of a teenage murder victim? Where does that come from? It comes from a culture in which news is converted not merely to profit, but to the grist that becomes a part of the identity of the whole operation. The Murdoch publications hacked phones not because they were newspapers, but because they were Murdoch newspapers. And if you had never lived, boss, this never would have happened. It was about power, the same way you bought Newt Gingrich with a book deal, and sacked a guy in Hong Kong because he displeased the leaders of (shh!) Red China, and kept the New York Post and the Weekly Standard going all these years despite the fact that you don't make a dime on any of them. This was about your personal power, the same thing that enabled you to blackjack your way to American citizenship. You kept telling your reporters that they were the last ones not co-opted by the centers of power while you, personally, were always, as was said about the Germans, at their feet or at their throats.

Well, you got caught, and it's open season now, boss. The Department Of Justice is very interested in what may have happened on this side of the pond. Your best shot here may be to turn this thing into a culture-war squabble, another one of your mendacious us-against-the-world scuffles where The Man is trying to keep good, honest journos in their place. Given the success of your toy news network here, I wouldn't bet against you on that one. But, here's the thing, boss: The mirage is gone. You're a rich crook. That's all that's left.

(Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog)